My latest column at Inveterate Media Junkies is up. It’s part 2 of my look at pulp adventure films.

Two-Fisted Flickage (Pulp On The Big Screen, Part 2)

And if you missed part 1 or earlier columns:

If Adventure Has A Name (Pulp On The Big Screen)

Column 1: I Am Doc Savage

Column 2: I Am Not Doc Savage

He knows.

My latest column on pulp adventure is up at Inveterate Media Junkies. This month I’m discussing pulp movies.

If Adventure Has A Name (Pulp On The Big Screen)

And if you missed the earlier columns:

Column 1: I Am Doc Savage

Column 2: I Am Not Doc Savage

I AM NOT DOC SAVAGE

Though no horns adorn my head
My spirit points to the moon’s sky.

Though my legs don’t end in hoofs
I walk a cocksure prance ‘cross sacred Earth.

My body is hairy.
I’m a proud-hung young buck.
Behind sharp eyes my soul stalks wild.

Horned God–
Horny As Hell God–
Reviled by  fundamental debasers of flesh sacredness–
You still live
in me.

I will drink red wine
I will eat bloody venison meat
And I will dance and sing and fuck and live
So that you may be sacred still.

So that I may be sacred still.

So that life will be sacred still.

Planks solid underfoot

then

storm and waves and
wind bash and batter
splintering
that on which I stand.

I drift
looking at stars for guidance.

The dark god
has struck
is trying to keep me from
landfall
I have yearned toward.

My heart is strong.
I swim like a bastard.

Estuary.
River mouth roaring turbulence
and it seems I’m lost
just as I am saved.

I pray the god of this river
for sanctuary:

O great flowing god
god of life and motion
and change; 

O great god,
I ask your mercy
I am on my knees
your suppliant

and I see that in your flow
is wisdom gained
and strength born
if only I swim, and look,
and realize.

Grant me, o god,
sanctuary and
sanctity;
safe harbor;
calm shores to salve
my wounds…

and spirits to guide me.

And then were the waters
calmed;
then, the sky grew blue;
then, the bright sun
burned away darkness,
leaving shadow, plain to see,
but woven into the world of light,
unhidden
undangerous.

Landfall.
And I am alive.

And living.

I hear your heartbeat in my heart
Pushing and pulling and warming my blood.
I feel your breath in my lungs
Filling, gasping me with life.
I taste your mouth in my mouth
Teeth nibbling, tongue slippery-ing me to joy.

Your body.
My body.
Our body.

I feel skin memory of your lips on me
Sucking me deep
Throat deep
Drinking my seed to your belly.

Your sea brine cream taste won’t leave my tongue.

I am cumulative countless nights deep in your center
Throbbing our heartbeat
Breath-gasping our hot shared air
Mouths mouthing, sliding wet wild
Screaming pounding clawing our voice
Runneling our sweat
Spewing sticky salt our sperm
My sperm. Concentrated me.
Into you.

I never want(ed) to lose our body. Our love.

It is a vision
some would say
lacks grace:

our two sweaty bodies
coiled together
mouths and crotches
slurping
sucking
lapping
warm
and wet
and rockhard
or soft.

It is not love-making of the face to face sort
but more carnal
if only for its social awkwardness.

The vision recurs…

I remember your soft flesh
wet and musky
moving under my probing, stroking
tongue–
the feel of your lips teeth tongue
throat
engulfing my shaft, swallowing, tasting me.
Our bodies tight and heaving.
Lost in passion,
topsy turvy with love,
no up nor down to this lustful embrace,
this meal
as I eat you as
you eat me as
I eat you
as you eat me
as–

Some would say
it lacks, if not taste,
definitely grace.
‘Tis not tactful, to love so.

But to me, remembering,
there was eternity in the act,
a circle formed without seam
complete
two halves making a perfect roundness
rolling like a wheel
toward forever.
Like the worm Ouroboros
swallowing its snaking tail,
to me, if only me,
we formed an eternity.

To live,
we eat.

you run for        deer life
blood shoots through veins of flesh
horns       rattling branches       as
hooves          sink in dark autumn mulch

and         rifleshot cracks         the cold air
shatters your ribs          blood exploding     spraying
you stagger         pain       and run on          pain
world reels in your eyes

rifleshot cracks

your head jerks       odd angle
bony point on right antler        splinters
in near miss       pain   in   side         inside

but        then      eyes clear  as lovewarmthstrength
fills you      pain washes away     spindly legs become
muscled springs launching through forest faster than
before      ever before     and       in mind mixed
of personal moment and species past is sudden
recognition of        GODHOOD       in you but
also utter terrifying            aloneness
other deer in forest      but you the last of herd
of line from out you heaved       bloody sticky awkward

cold air      run     no pain      run      hunter far behind
you reach sweet drinking creek      slow      blood flow from
side of mouth     hot sweet       stagger       fold
to earth        painless grace     vision rolls       breathe
breathe      breathe                   not
two spirits die        in you
your herd         your line
are no more.

I am sitting uncomfortably, strapped with my back to a pine, thirty-odd feet off the ground. It’s dark and cold, not yet five a.m. A periodic wind pushes the branchless length of trunk this way and that and cuts through the layers of clothing I wear. The worst part is my feet feel like ice sculptures in my boots. I can’t feel my toes.

I’m on a deer hunt, this autumn of ’91, but just as an observer. It’s bow season and I am unarmed. The men I’ve come with are spaced in hopeful stillness across several miles of night-dark Georgia forest, participants in a ritual much older than recorded time. Hunters. Predators. There is camaraderie, even when everyone is alone, frozen, quiet. Camaraderie building to beers to be shared, observations spoken, well-meant insults inflicted. But now there’s just stillness and darkness and cold.

Uncomfortable as I am, I have a thrilling sense of connectedness, an awareness of how alive I am, and how alive the woods are around me.  This place, this rural, undeveloped parcel of land, still dreams the deep dreams of wilderness, and I, not back in my bed partitioned from the earth’s breath by walls with their own vented, heated breath, am a part of those dreams.

Of course, I’m still cold, regardless. After a time I climb stiffly to the ground and stuff dry leaves between my jacket and shirt, down my pants, into my boots. Leaves are excellent insulation, which is why squirrels make their nests out of them.  I walk in a loose orbit around the tree, a crisp living scarecrow, to work up some heat, then climb back to my perch.

I watch as a distant white touches the easterly sky, hinting of dawn. I think of hunters and the land. Of tradition. Of connectedness, and reverence, and wildness. Of the yearly rituals, considered uncivilized by some, and that is the point exactly. Civilization can leech the blood from experience. Civilization dulls the edge of vitality. And civilization poisons us all–who in their right minds, given the choice, would choose to eat store-bought meat with its steroids and sickly marbled fat, civilization’s entrée, over venison, deer meat, clean and lean and healthy and wild? Experience, too, nourishes, or not, and the clean rawness of nature is essential to full life. That is what this is all about…or should be.

But later, the pack of bearded flannel-clad men reunite, tobacco-spitting stereotypes with pulley-drawn bows of aerodynamic design, and I wonder. From a cooler in one of the pickup trucks, canned beers are passed then guzzled, and after a truck is driven hellbent through a flatland, breaking a new trail, splintering saplings, crushing shrubs, its roar rupturing the cold morning calm, the emptied cans arc to the ground, gleaming seeds of civilization’s progress, planted, to grow, until one day this land too will lose its dream and life will flee and the primal shall peer back at us with a bent back and smoggy eyes…

I watch and say nothing, shamed at my own diplomatic silence and thus accomplice, as guilty as these men, who walk a time-honored, sacred path, thinking themselves part of the earth-and-wood clockwork ticking around them but never quite hearing the music of its rhythms…or the scream of its alarm.

She rises lunar above the crumpled flannel horizon
Heavenly body shimmering with lambent light–
Beaded sweat–
And the tide of blood in me flows toward her.
Then my Rising Sign waxes
Called by her–
And her fullness wanes
Across the dark-wall sky
And by the moonlight beacon of the window
I am eclipsed
Wet
Once again
By her darkness.

Earth moves.